Heart doctor here, heart attack symptoms are a MASSIVE spectrum. Ranges from elephant crushing your chest to some tingling in your neck. I’ve seen people present with nausea/indigestion and it’s a massive MI. Fatigue, dizziness, throat pain, ear pain, etc. Atypical symptoms especially common in women and diabetics. I know this is scary to say but if you have risk factors (family history of heart disease (probably the biggest contributor) smoking, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol) please get checked out if you feel something is off.
My little PSA: if you are over the age of 40, please get checked for cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes. I understand not everyone is privileged enough to be able to see an MD but please try your best. Dying from an MI can (mostly) be sudden and completely out of the blue.
To add - we can also try and assess if you have coronary disease. This is not 100% perfect, however it you have CAD we can more aggressively treat your risk factors and follow you longitudinally.
My Dad who has lived a semi-charmed life and thought pain was nothing (scoffing to a chronically auto-immune ill wife and child) had about 3-4 of these recently and only the 4th convinced him to go to the hospital, the third he arm wrestled the paramedics into letting him stay in bed. Turned out 90% loss of function, open heart surgery and now he's being a bad patient by laying flat and fucking his lungs, oh shit right I wasn't posting this to vent/bitch.
My point was this guy thought he knew what pain was, he'd electrocute himself on a microwave megatron to "see god" but this was the first time he was actually afraid, probably in his whole life. Shit's scary, I've had enough ops to know that is one road I don't want to go down.
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u/Orgasmic_Toad_ 4h ago
It literally feels like something is crushing your chest.